In the past five years, utility bills have risen 30 percent, largely because of the rising cost of fuel, mainly coal and natural gas. The country’s leading consumer organizations, including the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, recently wrote to President-elect Barack Obama, calling on him “to devote as much attention to the affordability of electricity as has been devoted to gasoline.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that by 2030, demand for electricity will be 30 percent higher, the equivalent of adding four Californias to the power grid.

In some regions, demand will soon outstrip supply. The North America Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the reliability of the U.S. electric power grid, projects that the desert Southwest will be at risk for blackouts in 2010 because of a shortage of power generation capacity. An Agriculture Department report this year on rural electric power generation found that “brownouts are probable unless investment in transmission is increased and simultaneously, energy efficiency efforts and demand side management must be intensified.”

But the left has its own solution: energy efficiency. The Center for American Progress’ Joe Romm writes:

While a few states have energy-efficiency strategies, none matches what California has done. In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent. If the entire nation had California’s much cleaner electric grid, we would cut total U.S. global-warming pollution by more than a quarter without raising American electric bills. And if all of America adopted the same energy-efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another polluting power plant.

But Romm pretends that all this energy efficiency has been cost free … even economically stimulating. He’s dead wrong. The Manhattan Institute’s Max Schultz reports:

dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group.

Another secret: California’s proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country—nearly twice the national average, a 2002 Milken Institute study found—largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves for lower-cost locales. Twenty years ago or so, you could count eight automobile factories in California; today, there’s just one, and it’s the same story with other industries, from chemicals to aerospace. Yet Californians still enjoy the fruits of those manufacturing industries—driving cars built in the Midwest and the South, importing chemicals and resins and paints and plastics produced elsewhere, and flying on jumbo jets manufactured in places like Everett, Washington. California can pretend to have controlled energy consumption, but it has just displaced it.

Even before President-elect Barack Obama takes office, the United States has been forced to follow the left’s energy efficiency gamble. A network of environmental groups including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council have coordinated to stop construction on 65 coal plants and 13 natural gas plants nationwide.

Obama is going to have a compliant Congress to implement all the energy efficiency measures he wants. If the blackouts still come in 2010 we will know exactly who to blame.

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Energy Efficiency is 1/4 the cost of new coal plants and 1/8 the cost of nuclear plants. It is sad that you put energy efficiency in the title and make an economic argument against energy efficiency based on renewables. The rates in CA are not high because of energy efficiency, they are high because of renewables and natural gas.

This information has left out one major item in California's future, the electric car. If the environmental rules that California has proposed go into effect, only electric cars will be able to meet them. Where will that electric come from? According to my professor of thermodynamics, who is a Doctorate in thermodynamics, if the whole country went to the electric car, we would have to triple the size of the grid. Applying that to Calif., they will need app. 100 Gigawatts of additional power, either by building it, buying it from surrounding states, or through efficiency, shown by having heavy users leave the state. If any more users leave the state, their economy will be in even worse shape (their Governor is in Washington for a "bailout") and, since the southwest is already in trouble, probably due to what Calif. is buying from them, there won't be any state that can sell them any more, they are left to building or trying to make alternative power economical, which won't happen in the near future. In other words, THEY'RE SCREWED !! To alleviate the problem, remember the offshore oil that they would never drill for? Well, they are going to drill for it. It was ridiculous, anyway, as the oil has so much pressure behind it that it comes ashore as tar globs. They can build oil-fired electric plants to use their own oil to meet the demand. They could also kill those five indians that are holding up the geothermal unit and use it.

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